With the development of Ethernet network technology, the Ethernet network has been increasingly applied to industrial fields, and operation stability and benefit increase of industrial production require more on the availability of the industry Ethernet network in case of fault. In view of the requirement of high availability of the industry Ethernet network, the existing industry Ethernet network generally uses the master-slave ring network redundancy implementation mechanism which controls the operation of the whole network by a master exchanging device in the Ethernet network system to ensure that the whole network is available in the event that a fault occurs in a certain exchanging device in the Ethernet network. However, in the above master-slave ring redundancy implementation mechanism, the fault risk in the network are highly converged on the master exchanging device, such that the whole Ethernet network may be unavailable in the case that a fault occurs in the master exchanging device.
In the prior art, in order to overcome the problem that the network will be unavailable in the event that a fault occurs in the master exchanging device in the master-slave ring network redundancy implementation mechanism, a distributed Ethernet network system is used, which includes a plurality of exchanges connected in sequence to form a ring structure. FIG. 1 illustrates a flow chart of implementing a fault processing by the system:
Step 101: performing configuration for all exchanges in the system.
Step 102: performing periodically loop detection and protocol machine detection for the system according to an instruction of predetermined configuration.
Step 103: sending a fault alarming message when detecting a loop fault or protocol machine fault.
It can be understood from the existing Ethernet network fault processing method that the method implements a distributed fault detection and diagnosis, indicates the principle of fairness in communication in the Ethernet network and solves the problem of highly converged risks of availability of Ethernet network resulted from a fault occurred in the master exchange device. However, in the case that a plurality of faults occur in a plurality of exchanging devices in the network, the Ethernet network system will be unavailable since the distributed single ring redundancy network can only process a fault occurred in a single exchanging device; and when a single fault occurs in the network, since a message transfer path in exchanging devices has been changed, the time of fault recovery of the Ethernet network is prolonged, and the availability of the Ethernet network is correspondingly decreased because an inherent FDB table in exchanging devices need to be reconstructed during fault recovery.